Recently I have been involved in a few e-mail projects – most notably analysing and optimizing emails. Research has shown that e-mail drives a higher conversion rate than both search and social efforts. If you have a database full of engaged users that have signed up for your newsletters or promotions, optimizing your emails is definitely a worthwhile activity that could lead to more sales and a higher conversion rate.

What is email optimization? How do I do it?

For those that are not in the digital marketing industry, the words ‘optimizing’ and ‘optimization’ might just sound like buzz words. In this scenario, optimizing simply means improving e-mails (through various methods) so that consumers are more likely to perform your desired action, such as purchasing a product, liking your Facebook page and so forth.

Testing different email variables

Optimizing emails can involve testing a number of variables and analysing the results. When creating a test, it is good to have a goal in mind. For example, the next email I send out I want to increase Open Rates. From that goal, you can then expand to test different aspects such as subject lines, scheduling etc.

I have created a diagram below to show the different variables that you can test.

This diagram is not all inclusive, it is designed to give you an idea of different goals and variables you could test to reach your goal.

In part 2 of ‘How to optimize emails’ I will look at multivariate testing and recording results.

About

Anne Hoang is a digital professional and has been in the online arena for over 7 years. She blogs about online marketing, analytics and working in the digital industry. In her spare time, she enjoys travelling, photography and snorkelling.